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Aloha Old Codger,
Was only on Casodex for 2 weeks before Lupron so can't really answer that question. It was used to stop a spike that would spike when Lupron was started.
The PSA rise? Mine was 0.3 July 2012 after surgery and remained below 0.7 to July 2012. In the past few mths it has risen to 1.3, so you are ahead of me on that curve (also pathology of bladder & prostate ... no cancer). Docs don't seem bothered & haven't made any comments. Before the surgery, like you, I was "high risk". It would seem that 3.8 may be worrysome, but perhaps it is not. Sure would like to know what is causing the upward trend. It is also worrysome why your treatments on the remaining urethra did nothing.
So, where is this PSA coming from & what does it mean?
Hang in there,
Joe
There are instances whereby casodex at some juncture or some patients AR (receptor condition) can cause casodex to feed PCa and increase psa. I hear that the increases are somewhat notable and might not be as slight as yours is, e.g. say from psa of 2.0 to 15.0+, in such phenomena if one then goes off casodex abruptly something called AAWD (anti androgen withdrawal) can happen and psa will drop soon (thus you know it was feeding the PCa).
There are exceptions in PCa, and psa is not the best marker as high gleason scores and other reasons can have much less psa 'leak' so in rarer occasions some guys have low psa's but have nasty PCa disease, maybe even mets happening with low psa levels, it is more rare.
My guess (s.w.a.g) is you are not feeding it with casodex, you ought to see if you can find a doc to write an Rx for estrogen patches or DES or emcyt. Docs more apt to write one for patches, the reason is estrogenic drugs can cause direct apoptosis (PCa cell death), you might get lucky and clean up those cells in the area or atleast drive your psa way down and get more duration. I did similar idea after 2 yrs. of ADT3 and starting to fail it and got almost 8 years thereafter of low psa's and control, then that program failed and onto other drugs in the last year. You can take estrogenic drugs even with Lupron or casodex and one time recently when failing control I tried casodex+estradiol patches and got a new lowered psa in a doubling time scenario, but only lasted about 2 months as I am dealing with hrpca and into year 11.5 right now.
Probably typo and should be emcyt which is estramustine, a capsule form of another estrogenic type of drug. Dr. Fred Lee is alive at 30+ years now with incurable PCa because he used this drug, the story can be found on google (starts with Rochester Urology.....where he still works 1 day a week)
